Synopses & Reviews

Publisher Comments:

Mohawk, New York, is one of those small towns that lie almost entirely on the wrong side of the tracks. Its citizens, too, have fallen on hard times. Dallas Younger, a star athlete in high school, now drifts from tavern to poker game, losing money, and, inevitably, another set of false teeth. His ex-wife, Anne, is stuck in a losing battle with her mother over the care of her sick father. And their son, Randall, is deliberately neglecting his school work — because in a place like Mohawk it doesn't pay to be too smart.

In Mohawk, Richard Russo explores these lives with profound compassion and flint-hard wit. Out of derailed ambitions and old loves, secret hatreds and communal myths, he has created a richly plotted, densely populated, and wonderfully written novel that captures every nuance of America's backyard.

Review:

"Russo is a master craftsman....The blue-collar heartache at the center of his fiction has the sheen of Dickens but the epic levity of John Irving." The Boston Globe

Review:

"Movingly dramatizes an older, innocent way of life...brisk, colorful, and often witty." The New York Times Book Review

Review:

"Richard Russo [is] a masterful storyteller with a mission: to chronicle with insight and compassion the day-to-day life of small-town America...alternating episodes of boisterous humor with moments of heart-wrenching pathos....His characters are wholly sympathetic, but they are also human." The Houston Chronicle

Review:

"Russo writes clearly and without affectation...telling his elaborate tale with affection." Chicago Tribune

Review:

"After the last sentence is read, the reader continues to see Russo's tender, messed-up people coming out of doorways, lurching through life. And keeps on seeing them because they are as real as we are." E. Annie Proulx, author of The Shipping News

Synopsis:

Originally published in 1986 in the Vintage Contemporaries paperback series—and reissued now in hardcover alongside his masterful new novel, Empire Falls—Richard Russo’s Mohawk remains today as it was described then: A first novel with all the assurance of a mature writer at the peak of form and ambition, Mohawk is set in upstate New York and chronicles over a dozen lives in a leather town, long after the tanneries have started closing down. Ranging over three generations—and clustered mainly in two clans, the Grouses and the Gaffneys—these remarkably various lives share only the common human dilemmas and the awesome physical and emotional presence of Mohawk itself.

For this is a town like Winesburg, Ohio or Our Town, in our time, that encompasses a plethora of characters, events and mysteries. At once honestly tragic and sharply, genuinely funny, Mohawk captures life, then affirms it.

What Our Readers Are Saying

Average customer rating based on 1 comment:

lukas, September 17, 2014 (view all comments by lukas)
"Geography is destiny."
Like Faulkner, Richard Russo found his "postage stamp of native soil" and has been diligently working it for the past three decades. Recalling Dickens, Balzac, and John Irving, Russo specializes in small, depressed towns in upstate New York, many of which were dependent on an industry that has now vanished (paper, leather work). His characters are a bit eccentric, a bit hard luck, but they are survivors and Russo treats them with great sympathy, wit, and subtlety. And it's these qualities that prevent his novels from being merely glum realism about the failures of families and late century capitalism. This is his first novel from 1986 and will be familiar and appealing to those who have read his better known books like "Empire Falls" and "Nobody's Fool."

"Review"
by The Boston Globe,
"Russo is a master craftsman....The blue-collar heartache at the center of his fiction has the sheen of Dickens but the epic levity of John Irving."

"Review"
by The New York Times Book Review,
"Movingly dramatizes an older, innocent way of life...brisk, colorful, and often witty."

"Review"
by The Houston Chronicle,
"Richard Russo [is] a masterful storyteller with a mission: to chronicle with insight and compassion the day-to-day life of small-town America...alternating episodes of boisterous humor with moments of heart-wrenching pathos....His characters are wholly sympathetic, but they are also human."

"Review"
by Chicago Tribune,
"Russo writes clearly and without affectation...telling his elaborate tale with affection."

"Review"
by E. Annie Proulx, author of The Shipping News,
"After the last sentence is read, the reader continues to see Russo's tender, messed-up people coming out of doorways, lurching through life. And keeps on seeing them because they are as real as we are."

"Synopsis"
by Random House,
Originally published in 1986 in the Vintage Contemporaries paperback series—and reissued now in hardcover alongside his masterful new novel, Empire Falls—Richard Russo’s Mohawk remains today as it was described then: A first novel with all the assurance of a mature writer at the peak of form and ambition, Mohawk is set in upstate New York and chronicles over a dozen lives in a leather town, long after the tanneries have started closing down. Ranging over three generations—and clustered mainly in two clans, the Grouses and the Gaffneys—these remarkably various lives share only the common human dilemmas and the awesome physical and emotional presence of Mohawk itself.

For this is a town like Winesburg, Ohio or Our Town, in our time, that encompasses a plethora of characters, events and mysteries. At once honestly tragic and sharply, genuinely funny, Mohawk captures life, then affirms it.

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